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This chapter turns to a feminist-derived critique embedded in its own history of the emergence of gender relations as an autonomous topic for inquiry in the 1970s. The feminist-anthropological critiques about domestic and political domains which dominated the 1970s originated in premises similar to those that informed the earlier sex-role model of gender identity. The chapter also pays attention to two features in the social constructionist formulations, versions of some of the assumptions already encountered, and presaged in the citations from Paul Sillitoe's and Daryl Feil's works. The...

This chapter turns to a feminist-derived critique embedded in its own history of the emergence of gender relations as an autonomous topic for inquiry in the 1970s. The feminist-anthropological critiques about domestic and political domains which dominated the 1970s originated in premises similar to those that informed the earlier sex-role model of gender identity. The chapter also pays attention to two features in the social constructionist formulations, versions of some of the assumptions already encountered, and presaged in the citations from Paul Sillitoe's and Daryl Feil's works. The studies performed in the 1970s revealed that it is not men who emerge as specifically “social” in their orientations but women. Women claimed superior financial skill in order to circumvent male irresponsibility but not to control men as such. Men's traditional cult activity appears to have involved emphatic assertions of superiority as the basis for domination over women.